The time will come—perhaps within the next century in North America—when a critical mass of the populace will recognize the folly of religious belief. A national and global consensus will form that religion is bunk. The scale will tip. Atheism will become the common understanding regarding whether deities and afterlives are real. Some isolated contrarians will persist, just as Flat-Earthers persist today, but the paradigm will have shifted. (Recall that the Flat Earth was the prevailing theory before early scientists discovered our planet is a sphere.)

American society will then enter the post-Christian era, which has already begun in parts of Western Europe where the majority of the population of some countries is nonreligious. When the global tipping point is reached, the planet’s entire population will enter the post-religion era. From that time forward, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and other superstitions will be viewed as similarly quaint and intellectually primitive as sun-god worship is today. Democratic governments will follow their people—autocratic governments might lag since dictators often use religion to control their subjects.

Politics matter. It is through instruments of government that politics impact people. If politics were not infused with religious ideology, it would matter little that one individual has a personal theology different from that of another. We could live and let live. You like red, I like blue, mox nix.

But when governments create laws that encode the religious tenets of one segment of the population into enforced policies that apply to all citizens, we have a problem. No longer are your beliefs of no concern to me. Government creates a problem by imposing, by enforced laws, precepts of your religion on me. American Christians, Iranian Muslims, and other religionists who currently enjoy majority status in their countries would appreciate these sensitivities if their creeds became the minority and a similarly bigoted majority dominated them politically.

While doing some research for this image, I found a page on Answers in Genesis matching my search terms. Never one to pass up a quick laugh, I clicked through to see what “answer” Genesis could provide me on the similarities between human DNA and the DNA of both chimpanzees and bonobos. I did not expect to see what I saw. I expected some passionate claim that God is the creator of everything and that’s that.

Instead, I found a detailed article written by Dr. David DeWitt. My first question was “Doctor of what?” As it turns out, he has a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Case Western Reserve University, and he currently teaches at Liberty University, Virginia’s preeminent “Christian academic community” or as most people may know it, “Jerry Falwell‘s cult college.” How this man came to be one of the 0.1% of scientists that accept a creation account for the source of life on Earth instead of the evolutionary account is not important. I’m more concerned with how this man is able to suspend acceptance of a preponderance of data corroborating evolution in favor of a dogmatic tale of religious creation.

This is the first of nine upcoming posts describing “Reasons for Skepticism” derived from scientific discovery, not from wishful speculations about the supernatural. These will be followed by several “Reconciliation Theories” for bridging the growing chasm between science and religion.

1. Of many existing religions, which is the true one?

According to the Pew Research Center (2012), Christianity has 2.2 billion adherents, Islam 1.6 billion, and Hinduism 1.1 billion. At least ten other contemporary religions claim between 1 million and 500 million believers. Disparities among these religions are not insignificant—some are polytheistic and some posit reincarnation rather than a conscious afterlife. It can hardly be claimed that we all worship the same god. How certain are you that you happened to be born into the society in which the dominant religion (or your parents’ religion) is the one that believes in the true god?